In the Therapy Room: The Masquerade of Laid-Back Living and the Emotional Scripts That Run Our Love Lives

The Performance of Lay-Back Living 😔

It’s a Tuesday evening in October, the kind where the light hits the Hudson at just the right angle to make the city look like it’s blushing. Saskia sits across from me in my office with casual confidence, telling me about a fireman she’d been messaging with for three weeks. The conversations were electric—the kind where you’re texting at midnight and genuinely losing sleep.

Then he stopped responding.

What strikes me isn’t the ghosting itself. It’s the disconnect between what she’s saying and what her body broadcasts. Her words are matter-of-fact, almost bored. Her fingers fidget with her phone. She’s terrific at appearing fine. The trouble is, appearing fine has become her entire romantic strategy.

The Swiss Army Knife of Emotional Avoidance 🎭

Here’s what we don’t talk about enough: the word “laid-back” has become code for something far more complicated. We use it to describe ourselves when what we really mean is, “I’m so afraid of being perceived as needy that I’ve trained myself not to need anything at all.”

Saskia had perfected this performance. She didn’t expect much, was flexible, wasn’t one of those women with endless demands. Very reasonable. Very modern. Very much a lie we tell ourselves.

The thing about being relentlessly flexible is that it makes you invisible. You become a blank canvas onto which others project their fantasies. When those fantasies require someone with edges, with actual preferences and boundaries, you’re suddenly not interesting anymore. What Saskia called “laid-back” was actually exhausting: a carefully constructed emotional script where vulnerability was filed away alongside needy behavior and honest communication.

Her inner narrative ran like bad code in the background: “Real women don’t demand anything, therefore I am not demanding, therefore I am desirable.” This script drove behaviors she didn’t even recognize as patterns. She’d escalate intimacy quickly online because that felt safer than risking genuine connection in person. Physical affection could stand in for emotional intimacy. Intensity could masquerade as compatibility.

The Fantasy vs. The Face-to-Face 💬

Online, Saskia became a highly curated version of herself—unencumbered by the messy reality of having a body, a schedule, or actual human vulnerabilities. The conversations flowed. The banter worked. The space between her and her matches felt charged with possibility.

Then she’d suggest meeting.

That moment—the space between fantasy and face-to-face—is where the real work begins. In person, you can’t hide. You can’t craft the perfect response. You can’t delete what you just said. For people operating from Saskia’s emotional frame, that vulnerability feels like a trap. She wasn’t noticing her own disappointment when men looked at her without recognition of the version she’d created in messages. Instead, she was devaluing them. Something would be slightly off—his hands, his energy, the way he ordered a drink—and suddenly he was no longer the fireman from her late-night fantasies.

She was protecting herself. Making sure she couldn’t be hurt by getting there first.

This is the particular cruelty of attachment patterns that masquerade as personality traits. When you organize your emotional life around avoiding rejection, you become extremely skilled at rejection itself. You become the abandoner before you can be abandoned.

The Illusion of Type 👨‍🚒

Saskia had a type: uniformed men specifically. Firefighters, police officers, construction workers. She could articulate exactly why these men appealed to her—their directness, physicality, lack of pretense. What she couldn’t articulate was what these men represented in her emotional architecture.

Here’s what I’ve observed after years of listening to smart, successful people self-sabotage: when we narrow our focus obsessively onto a specific type, we’re usually not attracted to the type itself. We’re attracted to what the type means. We’re attracted to a story we’re telling ourselves about who we need to become to be worthy of them, or what they’ll provide that we’re missing.

Saskia’s fixation on uniformed men wasn’t about attraction. It was about protection. These were men who had chosen a life of structure, clarity, and rules—men who would never get too complicated or expect emotional labor beyond the physical. Except, of course, all human beings are impossibly complicated. When the uniformed man turned out to have feelings, boundaries, or his own attachment patterns, Saskia experienced it as a betrayal of the story she’d purchased.

The irony is that the narrower your target becomes, the more disappointed you’ll be when a real human shows up. Scarcity thinking doesn’t lead to commitment; it leads to hypervigilance. Every interaction carries too much weight. One bad text feels like rejection. One date where chemistry doesn’t ignite feels like wasted time.

The Emotional Script Running in the Background 🔄

After months of work, what became clear to Saskia—and what she finally allowed herself to feel rather than intellectualize—was that her romantic patterns weren’t about finding love. They were about finding reassurance. The intense online conversations provided validation. The ghosting provided an exit that didn’t require her to fail in person. The lack of in-person attraction provided perfect justification for moving on.

She’d built an emotional script so sophisticated that it felt like preference rather than protection. But it was operating in service of deeper needs: the need to feel desired without being vulnerable, to maintain autonomy without admitting that autonomy felt lonely, to appear secure when the real structure underneath was held together by constant vigilance against disappointment.

The work wasn’t about changing her type or “fixing” her attraction patterns. It was about becoming conscious of the emotional frames that were shaping what she could see and feel and allow herself to want. It was about recognizing that “laid-back” was anxiety masquerading as wisdom. That her rapid escalation online wasn’t spontaneity—it was a familiar pattern: get close fast, before someone realizes you’re worth leaving.

Questions Worth Asking 🤔

Do you describe yourself as flexible when you actually mean afraid of being too much?
Are you more authentic in text than in person, and if so, what does that protection cost you?
When you meet someone in person who doesn’t match your fantasy, whose disappointment are you protecting against—theirs or your own?
What would it mean to be genuinely laid-back rather than performing it?
If you lost access to your “type,” what would you actually be grieving?
How much of your romantic life is spent seeking reassurance that you’re desirable versus seeking someone who wants to know you?

The Real Work Begins 💫

Saskia’s breakthrough didn’t come from better dating strategy or widening her parameters. It came from understanding that her patterns weren’t flaws—they were solutions. Brilliant, economical solutions to emotional threats that had shaped her long before she swiped right on anyone.

Once you understand that a behavior is solving a problem—even a problem you’re not consciously aware of—you can work with the system rather than against it. You can ask different questions. You can build toward security rather than just managing anxiety.

That’s when the actual work of love becomes possible.

The men we keep at arm’s length reveal far more about our relationship with ourselves than the men we bring close.